• 0 posts
  • 32 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023
  • You’re welcome. :)

    I just overcame my aversion to medium to read your article, then I read the rest. I have to admit I’m very impressed, not only with what you were doing back then, but the fact we were exploring the same corners before modern “data science” was even a thing! My parallel journey was on a different track from NLP though. I was exploring spike-train-based neural net architecture, unsupervised learning, and how to give neural networks “tools” to work with (not tool calls, actual tools like a paint brush and a virtual canvas, etc). Damn… I think I still have ancient videos of that on my YT channel.

    My Intel Celeron™ CPU could never handle more than 4 layers of ~512 neurons maybe? I don’t really remember the specifics, but I think that’s why I stopped back then.

    I think that’s why the 2000s were magical for me, although your “grandpa” comments are now hitting me right in the soul. Damn it. :P

  • I used to write articles on medium too, but dev.to was where I ended up because I witnessed it being founded. As for why I mentioned it specifically? Not entirely sure to be honest. I think it’s the first thing that stuck out when I thought of medium because it’s literally the opposite in many ways… less focused on profits and ads. No non-negotiable paywalls for valuable knowledge that I can recall, developer/tech focused with a great and supportive community, easy access/exposure for new authors, and a whole gamut of other small but positive differences that aligned with me personally. These were the first things I noticed from my experience publishing stuff there.

    There are many other sites with communities like that that I’ve come across, for example: writeas.com as an alternative to tumblr/blogger and such, devRant is great as a venting space for developer-specific trouble/humour/jokes and interesting stories. Etc.

    I have a soft spot for small independent sites like that. The ones trying to revive the 2000s internet spirit/experience. No shareholders or algorithms to dictate what becomes popular and what gets buried based on profit-driven logic/metrics to steer the masses or influence opinions for the sake of ad revenue or sales.

  • That’s not the problem though. Because if I apply my perspective I see this:

    Someone took a shortcut because of an external time-crunch, left a comment about how this is a bad idea and how we should reimplement this properly later.

    But the code worked and was deployed in a production environment despite the warning, and at that specific point it transformed from being “abstract procedural logic” to being “business logic”.

  • This person is right. But I think the methods we use to train them are what’s fundamentally wrong. Brute-force learning? Randomised datasets past the coherence/comprehension threshold? And the rationale is that this is done for the sake of optimisation and the name of efficiency? I can see that overfitting is a problem, but did anyone look hard enough at this problem? Or did someone just jump a fence at the time and then everyone decided to follow along and roll with it because it “worked” and it somehow became the golden standard that nobody can question at this point?

  • Isn’t this basically the banana cultivation problem of computing? Linux has pretty good genetic diversity with mutations and speciation happening on the regular, MacOS doesn’t have that variety, but is a genetically engineered abomination that’s regularly gene-edited to patch problems out.

    As for Windows, I’d say it’s the Cavendish banana of operating systems.

  • They’re recommending a meme-distro in a serious thread without making it clear that it’s a joke.

    In this case someone might read their comment and follow their advice, thus ending up with Nyarch as their first distro. In the future, when they run into problems, they’ll have trouble finding support because it doesn’t have a massive knowledge-base or the support of a big community behind it like all the mainstream distros do.

    It might be an obvious joke to a Linux user, but a total Linux newbie might get confused or not even recognise it as such. If this comment was posted in /c/linuxmemes or something I wouldn’t say anything, but it is not.